A standard electrical machine, normally a motor or generator, has a housing, a rotor rotatable in the housing about an axis, and a stator in the housing surrounding the rotor and having a plurality of windings each in turn having two ends between which an electric current is passed to create an electrical field. A contact support fixed to the stator on the side of the rotor opposite its axially projecting output shaft carries contacts adapted for connection to at least some of the winding ends. Such motors are used with the impeller of a pump or blower mounted directly on the output end of the shaft.
Normally such a motor is manufactured in an in-line process where the parts are fitted axially together. With such production it is necessary to resort to a separate manual step for connecting to the ends of the field windings. Furthermore when several windings are used, for instance in a three-phase system with six coils, one end of each winding is connected to one end of the diametrally opposite winding to produce three paired windings with six contacts, substantially complicating the paths the connections must follow. Three of these contacts are connected together as the center of a star connection, and the remaining three contacts are connected to the respective phases of the incoming feed circuit.
These interconnections are often made by soldering individual jumpers in place, a complex and expensive manual job that substantially increases the cost of the electric machine. Alternately it has been suggested to seat all the coil ends in a printed circuit board whose traces form the connections between the ends and between the ends and the input or output terminals. This latter system is difficult to realize because the high current cannot be readily transmitted through a standard printed-circuit trace. Boards capable of transmitting such high currents are very expensive.